Technological advances in computing devices and networking continue to provide greater access to a wide variety of information and services allowing access from virtually anywhere in the world. Virtual offices are becoming more commonplace since the work that needs to be done can be performed from most locations.
Network operators and providers (both cellular and non-cellular) spend enormous amounts of money and resources in infrastructure to support the many types of portable devices and media now in existence and that will be marketed in the future. For example, cellular operators are scrambling to provide the infrastructure which allows a cellular customer to access IP networks (e.g., the Internet) and associated IP services via the cellular network. Thus, a cellular customer can now access information that is available on the IP-based networks. Similarly, computing devices can conduct conversations over IP networks, and even connect to cellular users.
Businesses still recognize the importance of meetings to effectively more products development forward, for example. However, bringing users together to conduct business from the many remote locations at which they could be and supporting the many available communications devices and media types remains a challenging prospect.
Conferencing can be an effective means by which employees of a corporate enterprise, for example, can conduct meetings. However, given the location and connection capabilities at any point in time, participants may want to join via different media types. With the advances in storage and computing power of portable wireless computing devices, users now are capable of interacting with many types of disparate data types such as images, video clips, audio data, and textual data, for example. Moreover, the user can typically have several types of devices with which to connect to the session. For example, one user can participate by audio/video from a conference room, another by voice via a desktop computer, and yet another by text input using a cell phone.
Such disparate media capabilities have traditionally been addressed at the server level by consolidating media processing capabilities locally. However, this is problematic in that more resources are required to administer such systems and these systems are more difficult to scale to meet conferencing demands.